A staged upgrade to 800G made possible by developments for 400G enables service providers to quickly deliver higher bandwidths and network capacity in data centers. Many service providers successfully migrated data centers to 400G by taking advantage of double-density QSFP-DD optical modules that are backward-compatible with 100G QSFP and by using optical breakouts to support four 100G connections per switch port. The same approach can be used for the migration to 800G; service providers can take advantage of the newest switches and 800G client optics without waiting for a complete 800G ecosystem to develop.